


Paper in the Rain

by Okadiah



Category: Villainous (Cartoon)
Genre: Immortality, Insanity, M/M, No Smut, Stream of Consciousness, deceptively dark, flug is a mad scientist, flug is sweet sensitive and insane, reference to animal testing, this really is a dark story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-18
Updated: 2017-06-18
Packaged: 2018-11-15 11:57:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,789
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11230458
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Okadiah/pseuds/Okadiah
Summary: Doctor Flug is stuck in the rain remembering how he came to work for Black Hat as his paper bag deteriorates.Along with his sanity.





	Paper in the Rain

**Author's Note:**

> So, I don't know where this special nugget of darkness came from, but here it is. I thought it was interesting that Flug could go through the Inc's security system and still live, so I took some liberties in explaining it away while making the tone darker. 
> 
> I also feel it's important to state the relationship Flug and Black Hat have in this fic is definitely not one I'd ever call healthy. 
> 
> Anyway, enjoy! I'd love to know what you think. If you're interested, follow me on [my Villainous tumblr](https://villainous-darling.tumblr.com/)!

Doctor Flug hated the rain.

More than anything, he hated the rain, and it wasn’t for some silly, honest reason. 5.0.5. was terrified of thunder and lighting, and would hide in Flug’s room when the lights flickered out during a storm. Demencia hated the rain because it ruined her hair and make-up, though she’d still run out in the middle of it just to jump in puddles before she realized her mascara was ruined and returned screaming. Only Black Hat enjoyed the rain. Flug knew his boss sometimes went to the roof just to hold an umbrella up high during a lightning storm. To dare nature to take him down.

To Flug’s count, Black Hat had been struck thirty-seven times. Each time the demon came back exhilarated, and eager to share such _exhilaration_ with his minions. Or at least with any nearby heroes.

If it had just been thunder and lightning, Flug wouldn’t have cared one way or another. But no. It was _rain_. Miserable, wet, horrible _rain._ It was the rain that had taken everything away from him. The rain that had changed the course of his life. The rain that had helped drive him insane.

And worst of all, it was the rain that was slowly destroying his paper bag.

Flug glowered at the dark clouds above as they wept on him at the broken, shitty bus stop he’d been forced to take refuge in, even as he shivered and tugged his soaked lab coat tighter around his thin body. He’d been stranded there for hours now. Black Hat had wanted him to create a new weapon, a death ray of all things, and the special combustion component Flug absolutely _needed_ could only be retrieved in person through an old contact of his.

In retrospect, he should have known better. Working for Black Hat was never without its dangers, and more than a few people had attempted to kill Flug to get at the demon. From a rational perspective, he could understand why they were so compelled. His boss wasn’t good by any stretch of the word. He was a _demon._ All the people who attempted to kill Flug always sited this fact, and Flug never gave a counter-argument. Black Hat was everything they said, and more. He was a villain, and they believed Flug was his weak spot.

Usually by this point his would-be assassin would call him a fool for serving a monster and proceed to try to kill him. This time, his contact had gone a little further than most.

How could a man as ingenious as Doctor Flug continue to work for Black Hat, when his skills could be better utilized. When he could do good work. Successful work. Work that would be appreciated instead of demeaned.

Flug hadn’t exactly answered, and his silence had been enough to begin the assassination attempt — he wondered when they’d realize it would never work — and when he’d left the body of his contact dead on the ground, the question had stubbornly stuck with him like glue.

It was also around that time Flug realized his would-be assassin had destroyed his car when he was miles away from Black Hat Inc. And then it had started to rain.

The walk to the dilapidated bus stop had been long, and he was drenched by the time he got there. It was made worse by the fact he was positive any bus that might have come this way had stopped coming there years ago. He’d have to wait for the storm to pass. His phone had been destroyed in the fight.

Black Hat would be furious with him, the next time he showed up.

Under normal circumstances, Doctor Flug really wasn’t an angry man. Half the time he’d argue he was so spineless he hardly counted as a man. But when he did, he wasn’t angry. Weak. Pathetic. Obedient. Those were appropriate words, and as degrading as they were, he was actually quite happy with them.

They kept him humble. They kept him tame. They kept him brilliant.

Them, the paper bag, and Black Hat.

But there was no denying he was angry right now. Usually his days were shit, but today was a day among them because the paper bag, his _face_ , it had developed a tear. Right along the front left seam. The back he could feel was in tatters too, from the rain and the movement just getting to the bus stop. His face was falling apart, dropping off in brown, pulpy segments.

The rain was doing this. It couldn’t have waited. It just _had_ to take away his face too. Already he could feel the madness rising. As he leaned against the colorfully tagged and broken wall, he felt the split in his paper face grow bigger. Light seeped through on the other side now too, and Doctor Flug swallowed. Dipping his hand into an inner pocket of his lab coat, he pulled out his spare bag, but it was soaked too. Unusable. Useless.

Flug curled up in the corner and could feel the maelstrom begin to grow in his body. Tug at the borders of his mind. Feel it intensify when the motion of bowing his head caused the top of his bag to rip off and dangle before his eyes. The rain echoed loudly on the ground around him, like mocking laughter. Trickles of water ran down his back and he trembled with fear and rage.

He remembered getting into an argument with Demencia not long ago. She’d thrown a glass of water at his face, then cackled that he should use waterproof bags if he wanted to stop being such an easy target. In truth, he had tried waterproof bags, not to make himself less of a target, but to prevent the damned rain from doing what it was doing to him now. Flug wasn’t stupid. He was a doctor. A scientist. Why keep using cheap paper when he could use that science to overcome such an avoidable weakness?

It hadn’t worked. Or rather, he couldn’t use the thing. _Wouldn’t._ Despite its advantaged, it hadn’t felt right. Hadn’t smelled right. It hadn’t been like the first paper bag, his very first new face, and if it wasn’t, then he wouldn’t use it. He’d just keep a multitude of cheap paper bags on him at all times. Flug could switch them out fast enough. It had never been a problem. But now it was, all because of the vile _rain_.

It hadn’t always been like this, but again the fact that things changed in the first place had been the rain’s fault too. What he could remember, anyway.

He’d been happy, once. Or miserable. In truth, Flug wasn’t exactly sure all the time. It was often a confusing haze, his past. Once he’d tried to look it up. To remember. To piece together some stable timeline of the fuzzy Flug he’d been before Black Hat, but when he tried to search, nothing came up. Or, when he really came close, a message came up. A message from a past-him kindly informing present-him he’d deleted all his records and should ask Black Hat if he was so curious.

Flug never asked Black Hat for the truth. Not that he thought the villain would tell him.

So he did his best to make sense of the mess that was left in his memory. All he could be certain of was the rain, and its role in destroying everything. Whatever everything was.

The plane, though. Flug remembered the plane. He remembered rain on the plane. He remembered rain on the plane, then an explosion, and then fire on the plane. Plane and rain and fire and chemicals. _So many chemicals_.

Flug adored chemicals. Chemistry. Biology. Machinery and electronics. He was a man of science. He remembered that too. He also remembered he’d made something very special with his science and his chemicals, and was on his way to deliver it to his client. Something unique. Something one-of-a-kind that would make him famous and rich and fix _everything_.

It was a single dose of a perfect drug. A drug for immortality.

Well, that was a lie. Kind of. Maybe. At least, from what Doctor Flug remembered, he was certain he’d planned on lying about something. It _had_ been an immortality drug, that much he knew — knew very well in fact — but it had been far from perfect. A rush job. Not safe. It would never have passed any FDA standards, and the very last thing he’d ever want to do was use it on himself.

The crash, the rain, the overwhelming smell of chemicals and fire and trees and ash as the heat started to blister and burn and melt his skin. His legs had been crushed, an arm broken and pinned, but the other? That had been free, and he’d only needed one hand to grope around for the metal case and activate the code to open it.

The drug had to be administered in two places. Once to the heart and once to the brain. And he’d only needed one hand for that too.

He’d administered it to himself. Next to the rain, what he recalled most clearly had been how much _easier_ it was for him to plunge the double pronged syringe deep into his eyes, than it had been to sink the other into his heart.

But he had.

His memories grew very foggy from there, but all in all Flug was glad of that. He did know he burned there in the wreckage. He remembered some of that. The agony. He was sure it would never end, and it was made worse by the god-awful rain as it mixed with the oil and the gasoline and his chemicals and _burned,_ all the while pretending to sooth his flesh with its liquid coolness just to let the fire in again _._ There had been hunger too. Thirst. Overwhelming thirst. It had been days before he’d been able to steal even the tiniest gasp of breath from beneath the weight of the wreckage piled on top of him.

But he didn’t die.

He did go mad though.

It was a side-effect he’d predicted early in the drug’s drafting phase, and which occurred in ninety-five percent of the rats he’d tested the drug on. The insanity was unpredictable. Sometimes it rendered the rats quite docile, and they’d hang upside down in their cages by their tails like possums. Other times the madness was much worse. He’d come back the next day to find the entire cage painted with blood, the rat in question blissed out atop a pile of decimated rat parts.

He remembered rather admiring those rats for their brutal, shameless nature. At the very least, they were most interesting, and he would smile at them as he placed them in jars before he buried them so deep no one would ever find them. So deep, they’d never get out.

At least, he thought he buried them. Sometimes he wasn’t all that sure, and would have nightmares about rats eating him alive in retaliation. Forever, now that he couldn’t die.

The few clear moments he could recall after he struggled free from the wreckage, they were like snapshots taken with a broken camera. Sometimes at night, Flug would stare at the ceiling and review them like an art critic, turning them in his mind from different angles as if that would tell him something new about what he’d done. In one he remembered dragging himself through the dirt with his good arm while the rest of his body lay mangled behind him, healing faster than usual, but not fast enough. He remembered water. A river? Pond? More rain?

He remembered a cabin, and a couple who’d found him and taken him in. Fussed over him before they started screaming.

The next mental photograph, the strongest impression Flug could glean was that he’d been sated. He’d laughed with glee and sighed with pleasure as his mind ran through broken formulas that made no sense whatsoever as he tossed teeth into a fire like kernels of unpopped corn.

That memory snapshot in particular bothered Doctor Flug to his core. The formulas he’d been thinking about then, they hadn’t made any sense and he _adored_ chemistry. Science. They spoke to him because his mind was remarkable. It was brilliant. But they hadn’t been speaking to him then. They’d made no sense. None at all.

And mad as he was, _he hadn’t cared._

Flug remembered looking into a mirror or water or metal and seeing his face for the first time since the crash. It was the first time he’d seen the underneath.

What had been there hadn’t been his face. It was where his face should have been, but that thing that looked back at him, that smiled and grinned and preened with insanity and no rationality at all, _it wasn’t his_. It wasn’t _him._ What he remembered of his old face, it had been … gaunt? Academic? Weak and afraid?

The face that stared back at him, it was confident and sharp. It promised wild discord with no reason at all. Madness for the sake of madness. No logic.

Every time Flug exchanged one paper bag for another, he never looked in the mirror. Every time he washed the underneath, it was with a damp cloth while he still wore the paper bag. He used to use dry shampoo for his hair, but spraying the aerosol under the bag often choked him, and killed the beloved, sweet natural scent of the bag.

Flug had cut his hair jagged and short, and developed a single apply gel which rendered it permanently clean at the expense of turning it radiant white. It never grew after that, not that he’d ever cared. He never saw it anyway. No one did.

Well, Black Hat sometimes did. But Flug always did his best to make sure he never saw the underneath itself. Not again.

But Black Hat had seen it, once. That had been in the thick of his insanity. Flug still had a mental snapshot of that moment too. Black Hat. Black Hat staring at him as Flug attempted to conduct an experiment by ripping off his own fingernails and chopping off a toe because _of course_ that was the right way to make the salt he needed to cure the meat he’d found on the bones of the dead couple that had found him earlier.

Shame tore at him, even now, because _obviously_ that wasn’t the way to make salt. And Black Hat had listened to him squawk on for an hour about how it was.

It _wasn’t_.

Black Hat, for his lesser academic intelligence, had even told him so. And mad as he was, what had Flug done? He’d gotten angry, furious that his mad science – for he was still a scientist, despite the insanity – was being questioned. He’d attacked.

There were no snapshots available to review that fight, and Flug knew because he’d looked all over his mind for them. He never found them. All he ever found was a copy of the correspondence which had led him to create the immortality drug and board a plane in the middle of a storm that had crashed and forced him to take the drug he never wanted to take in order to save his pathetic life.

The request had been disturbingly simple. An order for the drug. The surety of payment, triple if he could make it in half the time. The challenge was what had cemented the deal — or _was_ it the money? The way out of his shitty, shitty life? — but he had always wondered at the nameless client. Well, it wasn’t _really_ surprising his client was nameless. They’d have to be a fool to give him their real name. Flug wasn’t even _his_ real name.

Well, actually, he wasn’t too sure about that.

But the initialed signature, the signature of his client. It was nothing more than a harsh scratch, practically unrecognizable. But sometimes when he squinted at it in his mind, he thought the two letters _might_ be a B and an H. Or a D and a Z. Or an A and an F. Or—

But that was silly of course. Black Hat was a monster. A demon. Functionally immortal. Why would he want an immortality drug?

Sometimes Flug did think it was uncanny how easily Black Hat had found him, in the middle of nowhere. As if he’d expected him there. Another thing he remembered was the wicked grin Black Hat had given him when he’d opened the door to that cabin.

Well, it might have been a scowl. Flug had been hanging upside down while he worked to cut off his toe, so a scowl might have been a grin. But he’d always personally thought it was a grin.

Whatever happened during that gray, unknowable moment when his lunacy was at its peak, Flug had no idea. Still had no idea. But Black Hat _had_ been smirking afterward, even while tentacles and teeth and claws bound and gnawed and sank into Flug. He remembered laughing, high and wild at the multitude of sensations. Mad-him had enjoyed the pain, the insanity turning the agony into pleasure.

Inner Flug had hated it. It hadn’t made sense. It wasn’t rational. The madness was useless and barred him from his brilliance. For a moment, he’d surfaced from the craze, struggled. He’d said no words, but his eyes had begged the demon, and pleaded.

Begged and pleaded begged and pleaded begged and pleaded and—

Somehow, Black Hat must have understood. Like a god, he must have heard Flug’s unspoken prayers.

How Black Hat had ever guessed to put a paper bag over Flug’s head was beyond him. More than likely it was just to cover up the _repulsive_ underneath, but there was no way he could have known how effective it would be in stabilizing and grounding him again. Bringing back most of his incredible mind.

The madness had undermined everything, all the reason and science Flug adored so much, and a _paper bag_ of all things had brought him back. He’d looked up at Black Hat like a savior, and Black Hat had proceeded to attempt to beat him to within an inch of his life.

It had taken Black Hat a week to stop the attempt. Flug was a scientific genius after all, and he’d promised a drug capable of immortality. No matter what Black Hat did, Flug still did not die. He felt the pain. He always felt the pain, and it would rock him and jar him and make him scream and ache, but he would never die.

The beating had felt like a revival. It had made sense to his rational mind — his blessed rational, scientific mind. At his lowest, he’d thanked the demon. Explained the situation when Black Hat had scowled at him. Flug had told him how useful he was, as a scientist. What he could do, and how far he’d gone to save himself.

What he said must have impressed Black Hat, because he’d seen the flash of the villain’s eyes as a grin had spread wide across his face.

Maybe the madness still hadn’t been so far away, because when the demon offered Doctor Flug a position as his personal scientist, with poor pay, no vacation, too many hours, and the constant threat of, well, _a demon_ , Flug did the only reasonable thing. He agreed. _Readily_. _Happily_. _With pleasure,_ especially when Black Hat promised to give him his own state-of-the-art lab.

This demonic villain had saved his precious mind with a _paper bag_. He’d given him a new face, and work. He’d single-handedly driven away the insanity. The demon was terrifying, _horrifying_ , and Flug knew he’d do terrible and horrible things working with him, but in truth he did not care. He would also do brilliant things too. Inconceivable things. Things he’d never be able to do with anyone or anywhere else.

And that was more important.

So long as he stayed with Black Hat, he wouldn’t lose his mind. Not again. And if that meant Flug would serve the villain for the rest of eternity, he’d consider it an eternity spent well. It was part of why he worked so hard, even when he was tired or annoyed, or when Black Hat demanded the impossible. He couldn’t _bear_ the thought that Black Hat would throw him away. True, sometimes Flug didn’t succeed, or the products he’d concocted for Black Hat were flawed, but Flug could take a beating. It wasn’t as if he could die. That usually was enough to placate the demon.

But he’d failed this time, badly. And when he was supposed to come back and report in, he’d been held up by a back-stabbing contact and the _rain_. The rain had even had the nerve to take away his paper bag too. There was nothing left now. His goggles dug into the underneath and he tugged them off hoping to find even one single piece of his paper face still intact. Anything at all.

There was nothing but dark brown pulp in his hands, and Black Hat wasn’t there. The madness was growing in him, growing quick and fast, and the edges of his mind were fraying. Terror flooded Flug as he traced over the horror of the underneath. What would Black Hat do, when he found out? What would he do when he saw _it_ again?

He’d never take him back. Doctor Flug wouldn’t take _himself_ back!

The rain had stopped, and Flug didn’t know when that had happened, but it hardly mattered now. He reached for his second bag, desperate for salvation, but when he tried to open the brown paper, it tore in his hands. Clumped and fell apart like his first had.

“No! No, no!” Flug wailed as horror made his body shake violently. The madness was coming and his mind was going. They were switching out. He could feel it. He could _feel it_ , the reason, the blessed reason was replacing itself with insanity now that the paper was gone and Black Hat wasn’t there and the pain would come, the pain, the glorious, awful pain. He was becoming untamed again. Untamed and ugly and stupid and _mad_.

“So this is where you’ve been hiding.”

Flug squeaked and shrunk away, hands covering the underneath as he stared in terror at the dark figure towering over him. A monocle gleamed in the dim light, and the frown set into that dark-skinned face of terror told Flug he was in for punishment.

He’d take the punishment. He’d take it _gladly_. But his paper bag, it had melted away with the rain. Grown weak and soggy and now all that was left was the _underneath_. The _madness,_ and that wasn’t worthy of Black Hat. That wasn’t worthy of the greatest villain on the planet. Flug needed his bag, his face, but there was nothing now. The rain had finally stopped, but it had done its job. His faces were gone. He was damp, soaked, and any bag he put on now would just grow weak and fall off too.

But Black Hat was there. He didn’t know whether to sob with relief or fear.

Doctor Flug curled into a ball and shoved his head between his knees, hiding the underneath away as fear won. Not again. He couldn’t let Black Hat see it again. Flug couldn’t bare it, and he whimpered and choked back a sob as the madness in his mind began to crest. Not good. Not good. What was he going to do? He needed his paper bag, but there were no more paper bags, and if he didn’t have his paper bag he’d lose himself. He’d become untamed again. A monster.

Black Hat would see that again, and Flug knew – he just _knew –_ he would hate him.

A clawed hand jerked him up by the back of his coat, easy as if he were nothing more than a kitten. Flug flinched and tried to scramble away, all while hiding the underneath behind his hands.

“N-no!” he begged. “Don’t look! Don’t look—!”

“Oh, shut up.”

Ingrained conditioning to Black Hat’s commands made Flug’s jaw snap shut so fast he almost lost his tongue. Made him clench his eyes shut on instinct. He deserved this. Whatever was coming he deserved this, he did, he wanted it because Black Hat was the only one that could keep him safe. Black Hat was the only one who could keep him sane, and—!

The air in his lungs heaved out of his chest as if he’d been punched in the stomach. What hair existed on his body and the clothing that clung to his skin in a wet layer flew back with the force of an explosion. Flug gasped before he was dropped to the ground again. His legs gave out and he toppled backwards, but before he could lift his hands to cover the underneath again, something slid over his head.

Smooth paper, warm in comparison to the nippy cold outside, and the familiar, sweet smell of a brown paper bag. Involuntarily, Flug sucked in a lungful of that scent like the headiest drug and felt his entire body, now completely dry, relax and slump back against the broken wall of the bus stop. One of his hands reached up to gingerly touch the rectangular shape over his head, tracing its crisp lines with shaking fingers. A paper bag. A face. His face, and it was back and it was dry and whole and perfect.

The insanity in his mind lessened. The deadly miasma in his mind and body abated as he stared up at Black Hat through the eye holes. It was as if he was staring at some disappointed, divine creature.

_Yes._

Black Hat tossed Doctor Flug’s goggles onto his lap with a disgusted twist of his lips, and obediently Flug tugged them on. Let them snap over his face like a slap, securing his bag to the underneath, promising to hide it away. Help keep him tame, so long as he could endure the constriction, the headache that often resulted from wearing them so long.

Flug would have wept with relief, but weeping would only ruin this new face. The face Black Hat had brought for him.

He couldn’t, _wouldn’t,_ let that happen.

“Black Hat,” Doctor Flug said as he shakily stood to his feet before the villain, wringing his fingers so hard under his gloves that they ached. “I—”

“I’ve been calling you for hours now, Doctor Flug. Where’s my death ray? I expected it to be completed by now!”

“I-I’m sorry sir!” Flug stammered as he sprinted after Black Hat who was already halfway down the street. “My contact lied to me before he tried to kill me. The combustion component, it doesn’t exist. I’ll have to make one myself, and it could take weeks, maybe months—!”

“Excuses!” Black Hat roared as he rounded on Flug. “Excuses you know I don’t want to hear.” He grabbed him by his lab coat and shook him violently. Flug’s vision swam, but his face stayed right where it was supposed to. The paper crinkled and snapped loudly in his ears. Sharp teeth appeared in his vision. “When I say I want my death ray, I want it _now_.”

“Y-yes sir!” Doctor Flug. “Once I get back to the lab—”

“Once I get to the lab,” Black Hat echoed in a mockery of Flug’s voice. “Useless. Must I do everything?”

Huge, black membranous wings sprouted from Black Hat’s back and the next thing Flug knew he was airborne. He squawked and flailed but Black Hat’s claws curled around and sank into Flug’s upper arms. The wind was brutal up here. A drop from this height would hurt, despite his immortality.

“I’ll get you back to your lab, Doctor Flug,” Black Hat crowed with a sharp smile. “We’re going to have to go through the storm to get there though. We’re going to have to go through the rain.”

Flug stared at the wall of rain before them in horror, screamed as he covered his brand-new paper bag. Black Hat howled with laughter as, right before they reached the rain, he veered and climbed, higher and higher into the sky. So high the air was thin and Flug saw spots. So high he started to get the bends from the altitude.

But there was no rain here. Only his paper bag. Only his brilliant, broken mind, tamed once again.

And Black Hat.


End file.
